Other Stuff

The Lean Startup Circle is a Google discussion group (anyone can join) centered on Customer Development/Lean Startup strategy, tactics and implementation. They were kind enough to sponsor a meet-up in San Francisco.

This is an awesome post and I really appreciate the availability of the slides as well as the video. By seeing the video, I gained some more understanding of the slides and concepts (which I have read about on your blog).

I like your comment on “get liquid in a bubble”. Our startup was venture funded in 1999 and we didn’t pay enough attention to this advice! We also took over 6 months and $2M to get to an alpha and, yes, we built it in a vacuum. When we did get customer feedback that the product wasn’t exactly what they wanted it was hard to hear and also hard to recover from since we had spent most of our “A” round getting to that point. My takeway from that episode was fail fast, fail often – it’s easier now that it’s cheaper as well!

I also like the segment on characterizing your market. Sometimes that can be hard. For example, our company finances renewable energy installations (solar, fuel cell, etc.) and I am not sure if that is (a) a new market or (b) a segment of the existing market for energy. Under (a) we need to wait for the market to continue to develop, have reference customers, etc. while if it’s (b) we can shovel money out the door creating demand and sell into it. Renewable energy has elements of both though because it is a new product market, but also is better (cleaner) or cheaper (sometimes).

[…] by Google as an early adopter, and the company is actively engaging with him on an ongoing basis. Customer development is a key component of innovative lean startups, and Google appears to be taking a page directly […]